The Broken Queen

Chapter 47; Trail:

Reece's POV:

We run through this wasteland for almost two hours before finally finding the origin of the vile scent I had caught on the wind. We had taken many wrong turns and Turro had to redirect me over and over again, as it felt like the wind was playing tricks on my nose. By the time we got here, rage was bubbling under my skin like a pot about to boil over. I really needed to let of some steam so I swung around and grabbed one of my tracker wolves by the neck, lifting him off his feet before slamming him down to the ground, throwing in a few rapid fire punches to his mid-section. Thankfully the small rush of adrenaline helped soothe the rough edges of my fury as I stood back up, brushing off my trousers. Kevin got up slowly, as if I was gonna attack him again at a moments notice. "Relax, you know how he gets when he needs to expel some anger. It's nothing personal, you were just the closest to him, and you actually got it very easy in comparison to others. Just look at Robbie, the Alpha's therapeutic moment landed him in a coma last week for three days. So just chill out man." Growling, I spin around. "Shut up Ger" I snap, adding some dominance to make sure he got the message.

"All of you shutup so I can concentrate. The root of the smell is here somewhere, I know it this time." Silence falls over the group as I slowly stalk through the densely wooded area. It seems to be coming from everywhere, like from many sources, so I close my eyes, allowing Turro to come forward to hone in on one at a time. His tracking abilities lead us directly to a dead rogue slumped against a tree close by. By the stench of him, he's been here at least two or three days. His flesh is rotting and starting to melt off his bones, well, whatever's left anyway after the local wildlife feasted on his corpse. The smell is so overwhelming, I turn away just as my lunch comes back up to say hi. Ugh. Looking around, I rush to pinpoint the next Rogue. I find it just a few feet away with its ribcage torn open and an empty chasm where his heart should have been. Jesus. The next one I find clearly had her neck snapped, seeing as its bent unnaturally at about a 120 degree angle with a sharp shard of bone exposed to the air. I know the level of rage such a kill requires. Damn. The stench of decay and bodily fluids is the worst here, as behind me are two more dead rogues who lie crumpled on top of one another, as if they had been smashed together by their heads, their brain matter rotten pools of lumpy sludge between them. As I'm about to to move on, I catch something under the reek of these three corpses. Rogue blood yes, but also, underneath that, familial blood. Dani! What the fuck?! Spinning around to search the ground, I notice a thick trail of it in the grass. Turro begins to whine and pace in my head.

'What if she's dead?! I can't lose another pup!' My heart starts racing at the thought, which is weird because I never cared before, or at least not any time recently. 'We would have felt it, she's not dead, she can't be..' Turro stops my hope dead in its tracks with 'Not if she died outside of our pack's boundaries, you know that. Something huge went down here, and clearly not everyone got out alive. This close to our border, what are the chances that she's still alive?!' Turro's panicking makes my blood pressure spike even more, my skin breaking out into a sweat. "Alpha? Is everything okay? You seem panicked by the sight of a few dead rogues. It's disgusting I know, but they surely aren't a reason for any concern.." Grabbing him by his scrawny throat with my claws out, I throw him up against the trunk of the closest tree. "My daughter's blood is among the carnage here. My daughter could be dead and you think I give a shit about a few filthy rogues?!" I roar, spitting as I do. Ger's eyes go wide in both fear and confusion. I've rarely laid a hand on Gerald since appointing him as my new beta but this is more violent than I have ever been with him before. "Since when do you care about her welfare or consider her your daughter?" he croaks out between strangled breaths.

I drop him, unable to blame him for his confusion because he's right. I haven't given a fuck about that girl-Dani, since the attack. I used her only as a maid, a punching bag and a whore I would pimp out to whoever I needed to please, as of last year, I-oh my god...what the fuck have I done?! That doesn't feel right, I would never do any of those horrible things to my little girl. 'But we did Reece..our pup has suffered at our hands and paws for years...we deserve to die a torturous death..' Turro's right, both of us are being overwhelmed with a tidal wave of confusion, love for our beautiful daughter and such a lack of the rage that has seemed constant since the attack, it has us both thrown off guard. Every fiber of my being refuses to believe we could do such heinous things to anyone, especially to our daughter, but the memories are there, swirling around my head, but now I am seeing them through different eyes, clearer eyes. What the hell is happening right now? I turn around to the group accompanying me on this search and some jump back half a step, eyes wide, all of them tensing up. I realise that our very sudden personality rewrite or whatever is happening has given them all whiplash. God, how bad are things if simply caring if our pup is alive is concerningly out of character for us?.. I sigh, I can figure everything out later, my number one priority needs to be making sure my little girl is alive and safe.

"Follow me.." I order the group, Ger still coughing and spluttering trying to regain his lost composure. I come across four more corpses. All at similar enough stages of decomposition, meaning they all died the same day. One had a huge hole in its side, flesh and bone alike missing, rotten organs spilled out along the ground. The next had its leg and arm splintered and swollen at awful angles. The last two were some of the most gruesome of the lot. One being impaled on a sharp tree branch by the head, the body from the neck down, crumbled in a pile beneath it, as if the head had separated itself from the rest during the earlier stages of decomp. And the second, lay in a pool of its' fluids, with its' eyes violently gouged out by what I would assume to be claws of most likely a wolf. 'Dani doesn't have a wolf, she's out here all alone, with no protection. It's obvious she was here and by the looks of things, she was involved in this in someway. By the amount of her blood in this area, she is definitely injured and obviously this couldn't be her doing, so who is she with, who did all this?'

I agree that she couldn't be responsible and most definitely is injured, but she isn't anywhere in the surrounding area and I can't smell her at all. The only whiff of her scent either me or Turro can catch is that from her blood here that's days old, but it is incredibly faint and is nothing to go on outside of this immediate area. Frustrated and worried, I run my hands through my messy blonde hair. I take my backpack off my shoulders and root out a hair tie from the side pocket, tying up my long locks atop my head in a messy bun like I used to. The others exchange weird looks with each other as I turn to face them. I growl lowly, and then announce that we are camping here for the night so I can sleep on how I wish to proceed. Though we need to move far enough away from the rotting corpses before setting up camp so the horrid odour isn't on top of or surrounding us as we try to eat and sleep...